Posted: Sunday, December 3, 2000 | 3:23 a.m. – St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Mexico's president brings Zapatista rebels back to table
The Associated Press
OAXACA, Mexico - On his first full day as Mexico's president,
Vicente Fox scored a major political victory Saturday, bringing to the
negotiating table a band of rebels who had frustrated his predecessor
for six years.
As Fox toured Mexico in a victory lap, word came from the southern
jungle that the elusive ski-masked leader of the Zapatista rebels,
Subcomandante Marcos, would restart peace talks with the
government. The rebels had walked away from the table four years
ago.
Immediately upon taking office, Fox made ending the seven-year-old
revolt for greater Indian rights by the Zapatista rebels a priority,
sending an Indian rights bill to Congress for approval and ordering
troops to withdraw from sensitive spots in Chiapas.
But amid the good news, there were rumbles that all might not be so
rosy for Fox in the future.
About 10,000 teachers, laborers and poor Indian farmers marched
down the tourist-filled cobblestone streets of the colonial city Oaxaca
on Saturday afternoon to demand justice and aid.
They were stopped by a police line about a block from the plaza
where Fox spoke to a smaller crowd to stress his commitment to
Mexico's poor and Indians.
"I am always open to listen," Fox told protest leaders who were
brought into the plaza to meet him. "There is no need for violent
demonstrations or blocking streets," he said, though the protest
appeared to be peaceful.
Fox vowed to concentrate development efforts in Oaxaca and other
poor, heavily Indian states in Mexico's south, and to treat Mexico's
Indian people with greater respect.
"We can close our eyes to infamy - to the rule of bosses, to
discrimination, to public and private policies that have tried to
marginalize Indian communities - but that is unacceptable," said Fox,
who was accompanied by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
The president, who stands 6-foot-5, sailed like a ship through a sea of
much shorter men and women in traditional Indian clothing who
swarmed him, hugging him, frantically passing letters appealing for
help.
The night before Fox arrived in Oaxaca as part of a three-day victory
trip around the country, 20 guerrillas in a nearby town announced their
new faction would continue to struggle against Fox and his
free-market economic policies.
Yet on his first day in office, Fox was moving rapidly toward peace
talks with the country's most famous rebel group, the Zapatistas, who
rose up in 1994.
He ordered soldiers to pull back from Zapatista zones in Chiapas
state hours after promising to send Congress an Indian-rights
measure that former President Ernesto Zedillo had refused to endorse.
Fox's top Cabinet member, Interior Secretary Santiago Creel, said he
would review, one by one, the cases of each of Oaxaca's alleged
political prisoners.
Fox has pledged to combat poverty with a national microlending
program and to channel the revenue from a growing economy into
improving education and health services.
He told the crowd his economic program "is not meant to achieve
successful statistics. It is going to be an economic project to improve
the life of each person."
Fox also planned to sign an agreement with the U.N. High
Commissioner for Human Rights to promote human rights in Mexico.
The protesters organized by local teachers unions claim that Fox's
economic policies threaten public health and education and do
nothing to help the poor. Demands ranged from greater funding for
schools to lower prices for cooking gas.
"We do not believe in his speeches, in his pretty words," said Astofo
Sanchez, a 39-year-old Mixtec Indian teacher.
Eliseo Ruiz, 48, another teacher, said, "We are going to be a thorn in
his side until our problems are solved."